Keywords

Shaping Justice studio; Courthouse design; Visual computation; Typology; Variation; Landhuggers

The thesis for this design is rooted in the concept of the courthouse as the most important building type in American society. The courthouse is the location at which the government and the public have a direct interaction. The courthouse has been historically such an important building that it invariably marks the town center of early US cities, an urban location usually reserved for a church or palace in Europe. The parti for the design is the formal and symbolic logic of the tree canopy as a formal shelter, a protective canopy, a soaring detachment from earth, and a symbol for the authority of the court. The courtroom level is decidedly raised ere above the ground level to a singular honorific plane recalling the primordial settings of resolution of dispute in early societies under the canopy of old trees and the auspices of the gods.

The design for the courthouse evolves around the conceptualization of the parti as the driver of the design and the design of a shape grammar to formalize the design intentions. Here a shape grammar has been designed in the manner of an ice-ray grammar to create a spatial arrangement of the program spaces that would both recall the imagery of a tree as well as allow light to penetrate down through the layers of the building to the quotidian plane below, as if the light was coming from the honorific plane itself. The grammar also creates such an arrangement to allow all users to experience the entire building. The grammar is designed to accommodate the need for program adjacency and to satisfy a desire for many voids and irregular geometries. With the combination of the idea of separating the mundane from the extraordinary and the grammar that produces a dynamic, kinetic quality to that extraordinary plane, the design creates a bold, innovative approach to the courthouse typology that lends to an experience unlike any other civic building for all users.